The Line Between Self-Love and Selfishness by Diana Reid, Author of Seeing Other People

The line between self-love and selfishness and how best to navigate it

Thanks to advertising, we’re all familiar with the concept of self-care. The exhortation “Treat yourself!” (and the implication that you’ve earned it) neatly takes the guilt out of pleasure and can justify almost any purchase.
But for people like me, in their twenties, social media has taken these concepts from marketing and pushed them into the realm of ethics. “Self-care” is no longer just a euphemism for expensive skin-care routines, it’s also a moral imperative. Any TikTok therapist or Instagram self-help tile is likely to tell you: if you’re not setting boundaries, quiet-quitting and generally prioritising your needs over your obligations to others, then you’re not living a full, happy—even, good—life.

Of course, in some ways, this is a welcome shift. Before the concept was subsumed by capitalism, self-care was a rallying cry for marginalised groups. In the eighties, the queer, Black writer Audre Lorde wrote: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Of course, in societies that deny or denigrate your existence, it is a radical act to assert your own worth. And, of course, I’m not going to bemoan that there’s a generation of young people ready to prioritise their mental health, and equipped with the vocabulary to articulate their struggles.

But I do worry that self-care, while a necessary ingredient in a good life, isn’t sufficient. In fact, I worry that it obfuscates much of the glorious mess of human relationships. Because the self isn’t a product that can be optimised, or an artwork that can be finessed with careful craftsmanship.
Humans are social creatures: we exist in relation to other people. I’d suspect that most of us, when considering who we want to be, would very quickly start to conceive of ourselves through the eyes of others: we want to be a good friend; a good parent; a good partner. So becoming our best selves can’t just be a question of our own feelings and needs—it must also take into account the feelings and needs of those around us, and our capacity to satisfy them. Paradoxically, putting other people’s needs before our own might be just what we need!
The question, then, is where to draw the line. When is self-care about getting what we want and when is it, paradoxically, about giving to others? This was the line I tried to draw in Seeing Other People. It’s a novel about two sisters and the summer that stretches their relationship almost to breaking point. In it, the characters must choose between what they want for themselves, and what they owe to the people they love most.

In researching and writing Seeing Other People, there was one insight that I found clarifying. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his book The Reasons of Love, points out a simple but illuminating truth: we can’t help what we love. Sometimes, we fall for precisely the wrong person, or we want to spend all our time working on the very thing that is least likely to bring us any fortune. The best we can do, Frankfurt argues, is to accept what we love—whatever it is—and commit to it wholeheartedly.

Where self-indulgence is the attempt to satisfy every passing whim or desire, self-love is taking the time to work out what it is you really care about, and then subordinating all other desires to that. For the sisters in my novel, when their desires overlap and they fall for the same person, they must ask, which do they care about more: getting what they want, or not causing harm to those closest to them?

I can’t speak to their decision on that question without ruining the book. But in terms of the line between self-care and selfishness, if you’re pursuing the thing you love helplessly, irreducibly, and intuitively, then, in my opinion, you’re unlikely to be on the wrong side.

— Seeing Other People by Diana Reid (Ultimo Press) is out now.

Seeing Other People

Bestselling author of Love & Virtue

by Diana Reid

Charlie’s skin was stinging. Not with heat or sweat, but with that intense, body-defining self-consciousness—that sense of being watched. She lowered her eyes from Eleanor’s loving gaze. Her throat taut with tears, she swallowed. ‘You’re a good sister, Eleanor.’

‘Don’t say that.’

After two years of lockdowns, there’s change in the air. Eleanor has just broken up with her boyfriend, Charlie’s career as an actress is starting up again. They’re finally ready to pursue their dreams—relationships, career, family—if only they can work out what it is they really want.

When principles and desires clash, Eleanor and Charlie are forced to ask: where is the line between self-love and selfishness? In all their confusion, mistakes will be made and lies will be told as they reckon with the limits of their own self-awareness.

Seeing Other People is the darkly funny story of two very different sisters, and the summer that stretches their relationship almost to breaking point.

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